The giant of a company clearly can't live up to the incredibly high standard of its impressive past, but...E-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN -2.61%) has certainly turned several patient investors into millionaires since its public offering in 1997.But it would be naïve to pretend that the stock's 230,000% gain since then wasn't rooted in extraordinary circumstances. That's the proliferation of the internet, of course, paired with founder Jeff Bezos' vision of how the internet would become a powerful shopping me ...